India is a country in Southern Asia at latitude 23°00′00.00″ North, longitude 78°00′00.00″ East.

India Mapping Project, the home of India on the OpenStreetMap wiki.

Hello! Welcome to the project for mapping efforts in India! You can find here national events, ongoing projects, map status and mapping guidelines, as well as links to other pages directly related to the mapping of India. You may also find a list of contacts and mappers involved with the OpenStreetMap community in India.

Community

Contacts

The easiest way to communicate with other members of the OSM community near you is by sending a message to any active mappers by checking the edit history of an area. Community discussions take place on the Indian OpenStreetMap Forum and OSM India Facebook group. The talk-India mailing list can also be used to reach out to the more experienced mappers and for advanced discussions.

Events

Disaster response mapping

If you're interested in response to future disasters, check out the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. In general all mapping progress in India will serve to make our map more useful to aid organisations in the event of a disaster.

Status

Primary contributors

Tagging guidelines

Naming in different scripts and languages

India has many languages and writing systems. The community convention is to use the Roman alphabet ('English') for the name key, and to use the name in the local language for the name:lg key (where lg is the lowercase locale tag preferred for that language in the IETF BCP47 standard, based on ISO 639 language codes). Wherever possible, add the names in all languages that you can; this will make it possible to create maps in multiple languages.

For example, to name the city of Bengaluru (Bangalore), use the following keys and values:

Where an official name exists, use it for the "name" key. If another name is more popular, it can be added using the alt_name key; in some cases it may be appropriate to place it in brackets after the official name. Sometimes the name:en or alt_name:en key may be used as well, notably if the international English name is better known than the national romanized name. For example, alt_name:en=Calcutta may be used along with the newer and preferred name:en=Kolkata, and will help improve searches by name, even if maps will preferably render the newer national official name for use in English (actually a better romanisation of the name in Hindi).

Do not use abbreviated names, especially for localities. If the abbreviated name is more popular, treat it as described in the previous paragraph: use the short_name key (append a language code suffix if needed, to match the same language as the one used for the unabbreviated name).

If multiple scripts are used in a name given using the name key, e.g. name=ग्वालियर (Gwalior), then this will cause problems when used on systems where both sets of fonts are not present. The fonts that the system cannot show will be shown as empty boxes, question marks, or other meaningless forms. Use name=Gwalior, and also name:hi=ग्वालियर.

If there are multiple alternate names, please avoid pasting them in the same name or name:lg key; but several names in the same language may be specified in alt_name=* or alt_name:lg=* by separating them with semicolons (;).

Mapping terminology

Most terms used as keys should be according the general guidelines, and different usage for India should be after discussion here. This section lists some terms specific to India, with preferred spellings when they are used.

Use the following terms;

taluk - covers taluka, tehsil, mandal

panchayat - for panchayath

district - for zilla et.c.

Note that this refers especially to the key, not always to the value. So you can have the other usage in the value for names. So a district would be subdivided into areas tagged as 'taluk', but a taluk could be called 'xxx tehsil' or 'xxx mandal' or otherwise according to local usage. e.g. name="Daund taluka".

Pages with specific guidelines for India

Please look through these guidelines and follow them for consistency with other users.

Landuse

Rivers, streams and lakes

Bear in mind that most aerial photography (e.g. Bing aerial photography) is taken during the dry seasons when skies are clearest. Hence water levels may be low and the aerial photography may be misleading. For rivers the width should be based on average high water levels. This can often be deduced from viewing the riverbed. If the river has wet season flow only, then it should be marked with the tag "intermittent=yes". Lakes and reservoirs should similarly be mapped at their designed high water levels.

Tag:waterway=river suggests a maximum width for a stream. If a fit adult cannot jump across it, then it is a river. Many smaller rivers in India are currently mapped as streams.

Common mistagging

Certain terms may be found to commonly marked with the wrong tag/value in India, often because of usage in Indian English. In particular